The Literalist
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- The Literalist
On gospel television, he preaches science: a desert prophet, who wears a white lab coat like a surplice, carries a clipboard the way that Moses holds the tablets. What moves me most, and draws me back to hear him talk, is how he strains between the bodied life of earth, and his belief that all the words come straight from God. He’s a man of science, wounded and crossed by science, who believes the bible as one must believe a theory: one part wrong, and the whole thing’s blown to hell.
As to dinosaurs, he accepts the fossil record, but carefully explains how God made Noah save these enormous beasts by carrying them into the ark —as babies! And as to why no stegosaurs cavorting in my garden like the possum who grins the same Cretaceous grin he’d grinned at dinosaurs, the literalist says— I heard him say it—extinction’s all in God’s great plan: the death that Adam brought to earth by eating of the Tree. To prove his point, he fixed a transparency to a light box such as doctors use for x-rays: painted images of vanished creatures; and as he named the animals, he stumbled on a certain bird, and at first I felt embarrassment for him, then shame: he couldn’t even name the passenger pigeon. My God—there once were billions of them: their migrations made a weather of their own as they passed over, darkening the sky. Shot down by wagonloads, fed to hogs— the last one died in a zoo. [End Page 253]
Still, he is just one man. There is no industry that bankrolls him, in that one-camera studio somewhere on the Southwest borderland. (I’ve heard him speak entire shows in Spanish.) Aggrieved, he implores us to listen to reason—reason as recorded, he’ll say, once and forever, in the bible. Which is where I come to a question: if scripture says—and it does— that none but God created all the animals— beast, fish and fowl—and commanded Noah save every bird of every sort, then how can I see a robin tilt its head, querying the crawlings in the lawn, or pass through the gates of a shopping mall, and see the pigeons crapping, scrapping there, and not fall down, quaking, to my knees, in homage to these, the living leavings of a loving Lord? [End Page 254]
William Wenthe, who teaches creative writing and modern poetry at Texas Tech University, is author of two collections of poems, Not Til We Are Lost (LSU Press) and Birds of Hoboken (Orchises Press, 1995Orchises Press, 2003).
